Certain DR buckets not rendering...

[evanerichards]

So I've posted a similar problem before but I think this time might be different. It seems to be a problem with our farm, as it has exhibited this problem on multiple machines on different scenes.
The deal is, I go to render a scene and half the buckets render black with no alpha. Here's the weird thing though. If I render a DR bucket pass so I can see which farm nodes are having the problem, it seems to be mixed. On one side of the image farm28 will render several buckets. On the other side of the image however farm28 will have rendered several black buckets. There are also some buckets rendering which don't display any node number in the DR bucket pass and just show up completely black.

I know this is kind of vague, and since it doesn't seem to be scene specific there's not really any scene I can post that might give you a clue as to what is happening.
It might not hurt to mention everything was working fine last night, but when I came in this morning the DR had stopped working reliably. We also just reset the vray services on all our farm nodes and that didn't seem to fix anything.

Any thoughts on what might be causing this or how to fix it?
Thanks!

[Svetlozar Draganov]

Thank you very much for the detailed report.
Would you please let us know also the following information:

1.The exact V-Ray and Maya build installed on the machine, as well the OS version.
2.Have something changed on the farms since the last time when worked fine? Software/Hardware updates?
3.Does the issue occur on simple scene with a few basic primitives only or it appears only on complex ones?
4.What is your rendering setup? Are you using a Render Manager? Can you give us more information about how the job is sent for rendering? How many machines participate in the rendering and etc?
5.If possible please attach a sample output image which illustrates the issue you are facing.
6.Have you noticed something unusual in the output-window or V-Ray log file? Would it be possible to send us the log files from workstation machine and from one problematic slave machine?

[evanerichards]

OK. So we restarted all the vray services on the render nodes and that didn't solve the problem. So we went in an restarted all the computers and that seemed(?) to work. So some of these questions I can't answer anymore now that things are working. But I'll be sure to remember them for next time.

1. V-Ray for Maya version 3.00.01 - V-Ray: V-Ray core version is 3.05.07 - Maya 2014 SP1
2. No. Nothing has changed as far as I know.
3. I believe it appeared in all scenes. We tested two different scenes. One moderately complex, and one complex and it did the same thing on both of them. Didn't get a chance to try a scene with just a few primitives though.
4. Our rendering setup is that I'm just using distributed rendering within maya and vray to harness all the farm nodes to help me complete this one frame that I need to render. No render manager (is there a DR render manager?) I send the job by just hitting the render button. There are 16 machines helping out my local machine.
5. Unfortunately I didn't save any of the problematic renders but next time it happens I'll be sure to.
6. I didn't look. I'll see if next time I can get some of the log files from one of our slaves as well as my local machine.

Thanks! I very much appreciate your help.

[Zdravko.Keremidchiev]

Unfortunately we have never experienced such issue before. In case you come cross it again it will be very helpful if you could provide the rest of the information and let us know which OS you are using.
Furthermore we do not have DR Manager, what Svetlozar meant was whether you are using Render manager along with our Distributed rendering.

[evanerichards]

Ok. I understand now.

We do use Qube as our render manager when we send renders to the farm. But this problem hasn't ever affected our farm renders, only our distributed rendering.
All of our local computers and farm computers have windows 7 installed.

I'll be sure to take note of all of these questions next time this happens.

Thanks again.

[evanerichards]

Ok. I have another scene where this same problem is happening. I've sent a link to the scene (it's a 75MB scene so I couldn't post it here) to support@chaosgroup.com

Thanks!

[Svetlozar Draganov]

We will investigate the scene and we will contact you via email when we have some information to share or if we have some questions.

[evanerichards]

I just found another scene that is giving me the same distributed rendering problem. If it would help or speed things up to have a second scene to look over/compare the first one to I can certainly upload that one as well.

[Svetlozar Draganov]

Let's first test the scene you've already sent and then if we couldn't reproduce the issue will try to other one.

[evanerichards]

Ok, no problem.